Going easy on preps?

the other thing is, there were other people who made mistakes on the losing team. A missed tackle may have been as important, if not as obvious, as the missed extra point.

 

I think that is the best solution. You give them credit for the good and you point out the bad too. That's the only fair thing to do while still being true to the craft.

 

Quick anecdote:
Last spring I was covering a state baseball game. It was a tight game, and the team from my coverage area had made an improbable and electrifying comeback from 7 runs down to tie the game.
That was, until their shorstop made three errors in one inning on three completely routine plays. He singlehandedly cost them the game. It was absolutely devastating to watch, and I don't even know anybody on the team or give one shit about the school.
Well, there's no dancing around that. I kept it out of my lead, but that's the most I could do for the kid. I described the plays frankly, and in detail, but didn't feel like I needed any adjectives to tell it. Fortunately, I also had quotes from the coach to help me out.
One of the players saw me the next day covering a different game, and asked my if I had written the previous day's story. I told him I had, and that I felt bad for the kid. But I never heard any actual complaints.

 

As a general practice, I stay away from evaluative terms. The first and most egregious one I noticed on this thread was 'choked.' It is much better to demonstrate the turn of events that constitute a choke than to just say a team or a player choked. "With 1:11 left and the ball on the 1-yard line, Clinton Portis fumbled away the Redskins' last chance at a comeback win." If that happens, you don't have to say it was a choke job. That much is evident in the facts. I do the same thing with preps. I do not shy away from naming a kid that made a mistake (fumble, interception, missed free throw, whatever) -- it happened in front of hundreds or thousands of people, so I fail to see how it being in the paper is a big deal.

A fellow board member covered a state wrestling tournament a few years back where a kid won his weight class final and then ran in front of the fans of his opponent's school and flipped them off. The officials saw this, dq'd him and awarded his opponent a win by forfeit. With the points from his win, his team would have won the state championship; without them, the team finished second. The writer took holy hell for reporting all that, but there was no way to varnish the truth of what happened. I wouldn't rake him over the coals, but I'm not going to treat that situation with kid gloves, either.

 

Anybody that does this deserves whatever anybody writes about him. Gloves come off at that point, I don't care how old you are.

 

"It's no coincidence that the first letter in the word 'martini' is … mmmmmmmm."

Rodney Mason, the guy who plays Sinclair, started a Steve Prefontaine fan club.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Mason

 

I had a quote a few weeks back from an excited coach whose team won that night by 67 points and he said, "We played so well tonight, we totally destroyed them." I put the quote in, but used the word dominated in the lede graph.
I think if a coach says it, which isn't often, but if they say it without thinking, you can use it because he's talking about a whole team in this instance.

 

Chaz leads in nicely to something else I've been thinking about:

We've established you accurately report what they do, good and bad. What about what they say? Forget the coaches for a minute, I only mean the kids.

Do you shield them from themselves? If he/she takes an egregious swipe at the opponent, do you include it because it's egregious? Do you include it because it reveals something about the person? Or do you disregard it?

I've actually been thinking about this over the course of this thread. It was reinforced yesterday when I called to set up a prep feature for a RB. Coach said he was interviewed after a big game Friday night and 'did not handle himself well' and 'needed to learn some lessons'. (Obviously it's not the exact same circumstance, but close enough.)

 

I covered a gawd-awful girls HS girls basketball team for four seasons. I covered a grand total of two wins (they won a few others at far-away tournaments). It got tough finding new ways to say "Podunk lost 65-31" over and over, but I never thought my reporting and writing were negative. Usually, someone on the other team had a great night, or maybe Podunk had a player with a double-double or score 25 points. Maybe a freshman for Podunk had a nice night. But more often than not, the ledes focused on Podunk shooting 15 percent, turning the ball over 35 times (both of which happened), maybe missing 17 shots in a row.

Hey, it's not my fault they sucked. Just report what happened. If Johnny Ballgame misses a game-tying extra point on the last play of the game, there's a way of writing about it without blaming him. The name has to go in, however.

 

For a lot of kids, especially the younger ones or the ones I haven't interviewed much, I might re-ask the question to try to get different words, or steer my follow ups in a way that lets them redeem themselves or realize the consequences of what they said. If it's a senior captain or someone like that who has dealt with me or the media before, I might be more inclined to let them stand on their initial statements.